Page 29 - Beyond Methods

Conceptualizing teaching acts 17
Teachers as transformative 􏰀 intellectuals
Teachers as
reflective 􏰀 practitioners
Teachers as passive technicians
Figure 1.1 A hierarchy of teacher roles
role as reflective practitioners, which in turn include some of the characteristics of teachers’ role as passive technicians.
It is useful to treat the three perspectives not as absolute oppo- sites but as relative tendencies, with teachers leaning toward one or the other at different moments. What is crucial to remember, how- ever, is that passive technicians can hardly become transformative intellectuals without a continual process of self-reflection and self- renewal. One major aspect of that process relates to the teachers’ ability and willingness to go beyond the professional theories trans- mitted to them through formal teacher education programs and try to conceive and construct their own personal theory of teaching. In other words, the process of transformative teaching demands that teachers take a critical look at the dichotomy between theory and practice, between theorists and practitioners.
Theory and Practice
It is generally agreed that teachers’ classroom practice is directly or indirectly based on some theory whether or not it is explicitly artic- ulated. Teachers may have gained this crucial theoretical knowl- edge either through professional education, personal experience, robust commonsense, or a combination. In fact, it has been sug- gested that there is no substantial difference between common sense and theory, particularly in the field of education. Cameron et al. (1992, pp. 18–19), for instance, assert that common sense is dif- ferent from theory “only by the degree of formality and self- consciousness with which it is invoked. When someone purports to criticize or ‘go beyond’ commonsense, they are not putting the- ory where previously there was none, but replacing one theory with another.”
That most successful teaching techniques are in one way or an- other informed by principled theories does not seem to be in dis-